The original British sleeve of This Year's Model looks wrong. Elvis Costello's name loses its opening letter. The title becomes 'His Year's Model.' A printer's color-control strip intrudes along the opposite edge. None of it was accidental.\n\nDesigner Barney Bubbles deliberately made the package resemble a manufacturing mistake. Costello later explained the logic plainly: if somebody in a record shop wondered why the sleeve had been printed off-register, they would pause in front of it for a little longer. In a rack crowded with polished album covers, apparent failure became an attention device.\n\nThe photograph underneath the trick was by Chris Gabrin. Costello appears behind a camera on a tripod, dressed in the severe visual uniform already becoming part of his public identity. The setup reverses the usual relationship between performer and viewer. Costello is the person being photographed for an album cover, but he is also staring through a camera of his own.\n\nBubbles then disrupted the photograph's authority. Rather than center it cleanly and add conventional typography, he shifted the printed image so part of the intended front effectively wraps away. The visible color bar makes the sleeve look like something that should have been rejected during production. Design Week later described the effect as a parody of the elaborate, highly finished sleeve culture associated with designers such as Hipgnosis.\n\nThe joke depends on precision. 'Lvis Costello' remains recognizable as Elvis Costello; 'His Year's Model' still sounds enough like a phrase to make the viewer notice what is missing. Bubbles did not create random damage. He engineered a controlled error that remained legible while exposing the normally invisible machinery of printing.\n\nDifferent territories complicated the story. The American and Swedish editions used different photographs and did not reproduce the British sleeve's deliberately misregistered construction in exactly the same way. Later reissues also tended to straighten the design. That means the famous 'mistake' is specifically part of the original UK package rather than a universal feature of every copy bearing the album title.\n\nBubbles carried the mischievous approach beyond the front. Early pressings included cryptic promotional details in the runout area and a free single, extending the sense that the package contained things for attentive listeners to discover.\n\nThe result fits Costello's early persona almost perfectly: confrontational, clever, impatient with polish and aware of the machinery selling rebellion back to an audience. Bubbles made a professional sleeve by pretending professionalism had failed.